Before writing anything about Dekad’s new album, I would like to express my solidarity with BOREDOMproduct, which had to suspend its label activities for a year after being affected by the wildfire that struck a vast area of Marseille in the summer of 2025. That said, let’s turn to J.B. Lacassagne’s project, here assisted by Member U-0176 on production. The new album A Distorted View arrives four years after Nowhere Lines and three years after Videodrama, the album by The Overlookers, a project formed by J.B. together with Creature XY of Foretaste. A Distorted View finds its strength in the instrumental department, where E.B.M. and synth-pop blend as if it were a collaboration between Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration era and early And One (I’m not sure why, but the track “I Should Have” particularly brought this comparison to mind). The sounds are never banal, and the rhythmic sections are meticulously crafted: instead of standard kick and snare patterns, you’ll often hear processed and modified percussive elements. This richness intertwines beautifully with the synth textures, creating a never-dull sonic tapestry that shifts with each track. In my opinion, this is the album’s greatest asset, along with its consistently catchy and inventive melodies. Lyrically, rather than depicting specific situations, the songs explore emotional states that highlight the fragility and uncertainty of the human psyche during personal crises triggered by relationships or social circumstances. To give you an idea, here’s an excerpt from “Crystal”: “Reality’s collapsing / My mind slowly fracturing / Shadows in the corner of my eyes / Whispers linger in my ears / Fading illusion / Broken confusion / In a distorted state / Nothing is ever straight". The only "weak" point lies in the vocal delivery, which remains within a fairly narrow harmonic range throughout the album. This makes the voice sound somewhat uniform from track to track. This is the reason why I’m deducting half a point from my overall score. Nevertheless, A Distorted View is undoubtedly an album that deserves your attention.

There is a peculiar kind of listening required for Kin by Joseph Kamaru. Not passive listening, certainly. This is not music for productivity playlists, boutique hotel lobbies, or the increasingly tragic cultural ritual of pretending to meditate while checking notifications every forty seconds. "Kin" asks for concentration the way fog asks for slower driving: not as aesthetic preference, but survival mechanism.

Released by Editions Mego, the record arrives five years after KMRU’s remarkable "Peel", an album that established the Nairobi-born, Berlin-based artist as one of the most compelling figures working within experimental electronic music and sound art. Since then, Kamaru’s trajectory has expanded steadily through festivals, collaborations, installations, and a growing international recognition that still somehow feels secondary to the actual listening experience. Fame remains a strange concept when your art primarily involves microscopic manipulations of air pressure and emotional uncertainty.

The title "Kin" immediately suggests proximity, relation, ancestry, belonging. Yet the album itself resists fixed identity at every turn. Kamaru approaches sound less as stable material than as something continuously dissolving and reassembling itself. His compositions often feel suspended between emergence and disappearance, as though entire sonic environments were being remembered rather than constructed.

The shadow of Peter Rehberg inevitably lingers over the album. Originally sparked by conversations about what a successor to "Peel" might become, the project was interrupted by Rehberg’s death in 2021, an event that clearly altered its emotional gravity. One can feel that interruption throughout "Kin". Not in any overtly elegiac sense, but in the album’s relationship to absence, delay, and unfinished transformation. This is music haunted not by ghosts exactly, but by interrupted conversations.

“With Trees Where We Can See” opens with deceptive warmth. Soft melodic swells invite the listener inward, almost suggesting ambient serenity, before subtle distortions begin unsettling the surface. Kamaru excels at these gradual destabilizations. His music rarely announces tension dramatically; instead, it accumulates unease molecule by molecule. The result is immersive without becoming comforting.

The collaboration with Christian Fennesz on “Blurred” becomes one of the album’s defining moments. Fennesz’s unmistakable guitar textures drift through Kamaru’s spatial architecture like light refracted through damaged glass. Twang, drone, and harmonic erosion intertwine patiently across twelve minutes that feel simultaneously intimate and vast. It is less a duet than an environmental merger, two sonic vocabularies dissolving into a third unstable language.

KMRU’s handling of texture remains extraordinary throughout. Many artists working in drone or electroacoustic abstraction focus so heavily on atmosphere that the music becomes emotionally inert, beautiful perhaps but strangely bloodless. Kamaru avoids this trap by treating texture itself as emotional narrative. Every hiss, distortion, distant rumble, and harmonic shimmer carries psychological weight. The sounds do not merely occupy space; they imply memory, tension, and movement beneath the audible surface.

“They Are Here” introduces darker tonal territory. Layers gather like weather systems over an industrial coastline, melancholic yet oddly magnetic. The track seems to vibrate directly against the nervous system rather than the intellect. Kamaru has a remarkable ability to make electronic abstraction feel bodily. Listening becomes less interpretation than physical exposure.

“Maybe” pushes further into instability. Pulses flicker beneath turbulent electronic currents, creating a strange euphoric anxiety, as though transcendence itself had become technologically unreliable. There are moments where the composition threatens to collapse into noise entirely, yet Kamaru always maintains a fragile internal coherence. Chaos is carefully shaped here, not merely unleashed.

Then comes “We Are”, perhaps the album’s most abrasive piece. The track tears through itself with fragmented rhythmic aggression that occasionally recalls the nervous digital mutations of Aphex Twin, though filtered through KMRU’s far more spatial and emotionally ambiguous sensibility. It feels like machinery attempting to remember human feeling through corrupted data.

The twenty-minute closer “By Absence” functions as both conclusion and conceptual key. Acoustic resonances drift through kaleidoscopic electronic layers in a way that continuously destabilizes foreground and background. Sounds emerge, vanish, return transformed. The piece breathes with immense patience, refusing climax in favor of gradual immersion. By the end, the distinction between organic and synthetic, presence and disappearance, feels almost irrelevant.

What makes "Kin" so rewarding is its resistance to immediate readability. Kamaru builds records that reveal themselves incrementally, through repeated immersion rather than instant impact. This is not difficult music in the academic sense, nor does it posture intellectually. Instead, it operates according to slower perceptual rhythms, asking listeners to inhabit uncertainty without demanding resolution.

And perhaps that is where the album’s emotional force truly resides. "Kin" is full of relationships that never fully stabilize: between Nairobi and Berlin, acoustic and electronic sound, memory and distortion, collaboration and solitude, mourning and continuation. Kamaru understands that ambiguity is not absence of meaning but its unstable condition.

The record also quietly demonstrates how far experimental electronic music can still evolve without collapsing into nostalgia or conceptual exhaustion. So much contemporary ambient and drone music feels content recycling inherited aesthetics, endlessly rearranging soft textures like interior decorators for emotionally fatigued algorithms. KMRU instead approaches sound as living matter: unstable, relational, deeply physical.

"Kin" does not simply ask to be heard. It asks to be entered slowly, like unfamiliar weather. And once inside, its shifting architectures linger long after the final frequencies disappear.

Electric guitar music often suffers from a peculiar form of inflation. More pedals, more speed, more volume, more evidence that someone spent adolescence practicing scales instead of developing sustainable social skills. Frédéric L'Epée takes the opposite route on "Contre Courant", stripping the instrument of its habitual theatrics until what remains is touch, resonance, and the quiet confidence of someone uninterested in competing for attention.

Released by Cuneiform Records, the album feels less like a conventional guitar record than a patient argument for the electric guitar as a chamber instrument. L’Epée’s stated ambition - to create a solo electric repertoire analogous to classical recital traditions - could easily have resulted in something stiff or academic. Instead, "Contre Courant" breathes with remarkable intimacy. The pieces unfold like carefully observed thoughts rather than demonstrations of technique.

That restraint is crucial. L’Epée avoids the reflexive gestures associated with the instrument almost entirely: no grandstanding solos, no distortion-heavy catharsis, no endless declarations of emotional importance through volume. The guitar sounds mostly natural, almost exposed, and because of that every tonal shift matters. Harmonics shimmer briefly before dissolving, chords linger with delicate ambiguity, melodies emerge cautiously as if testing the air before continuing.

The title itself, French for “against the current”, proves apt. In a musical landscape increasingly addicted to immediacy and saturation, these compositions move slowly and with unusual patience. “Festina Lente” establishes the atmosphere immediately, balancing motion and stillness with a grace that recalls the paradox contained in its title: make haste slowly. The piece doesn’t progress toward climax so much as circulate through subtle transformations, rewarding attention rather than demanding it.

L’Epée’s affection for early twentieth-century French composers hovers throughout the record, particularly in “Sarabande”, “Trois Miniatures”, and the remarkable “Les Sonneurs”. You can sense traces of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie not through direct quotation, but through atmosphere: harmonic colors that seem to shift with the light, phrases that evaporate before fully resolving, emotional tones suspended somewhere between melancholy and tenderness. L’Epée appears less interested in imitation than in imagining an alternate musical history where these composers actually wrote for electric guitar. A strangely moving thought, honestly. History could have used more tasteful guitar music and fewer twelve-minute drum solos.

At times, the album edges toward minimalism, though never in a doctrinaire sense. “Pluie Inversée” and “Anchor” feel almost weightless, while “Méditation Polyrythmique” introduces rhythmic complexity without sacrificing clarity or warmth. Even the more substantial pieces, such as “Floating Forest” or “Le Ciel après nous”, avoid excess. The music continually resists overstatement, preferring implication to declaration.

This approach makes sense within the broader context of L’Epée’s career. Known for his work with Yang, where progressive rock structures intertwine with chamber-like precision, he has long occupied an unusual space between rock experimentation and contemporary composition. Here, however, the extroverted energy associated with ensemble work recedes, revealing what he describes as the “Yin” side of his musical personality: inward-looking, restrained, quietly luminous.

There’s something almost unfashionable about the album’s sincerity. "Contre Courant" does not hide behind irony, conceptual overload, or technological spectacle. It simply trusts sound itself to carry meaning. That trust can feel disarming in 2026, when so much music behaves as if terrified of silence or subtlety.

And perhaps that is the album’s greatest strength. It asks the listener not to consume, but to dwell. To pay attention to resonance, decay, hesitation. To remember that intimacy is not the absence of complexity, but another form of it entirely.

A radical proposition, apparently.

There’s a particular exhaustion that only modern life can produce: being constantly connected, constantly informed, and somehow constantly wrong about everything anyway. "Computer EP" by DECENT NEWS takes that exhaustion, drenches it in distortion, hardcore abrasion, and industrial grime, then hurls it back at the listener like a riot shield ricocheting off concrete.

Founded in 2016 and operating somewhere between industrial metal, American hardcore, and the sound of a server room developing anger issues, DECENT NEWS have always approached aggression less as spectacle than as diagnosis. "Computer" continues that trajectory with admirable hostility. Five tracks, no wasted motion, and just enough bleak humor to remind you that civilization now largely consists of people doomscrolling themselves into ideological trench warfare while pretending this counts as participation.

“Flesh for the Feast” opens the EP in full confrontation mode, channeling protest violence, state repression, and collective disillusionment into a barrage of grinding riffs and barked accusations. The track’s central tension lies in its refusal to romanticize resistance. There are no heroic poses here, only bodies colliding with systems that already calculated the acceptable level of damage beforehand. The hardcore influence is unmistakable, but the industrial textures give everything a colder, more mechanized cruelty, as if the brutality itself had been automated for efficiency.

“Drowned in Power” pushes deeper into grotesque allegory. Its imagery of execution, mutilation, and a body incapable of dying feels almost medieval, yet disturbingly contemporary in spirit. Humanity’s appetite for spectacle has not evolved nearly as much as its technology. We’ve simply upgraded the delivery systems. The track lurches forward with an ugly momentum that suits its themes perfectly, every riff sounding partially rusted, every vocal line delivered like someone trying to spit blood out of a cracked helmet.

Then comes “Help Computer”, an instrumental interlude built around archival media samples celebrating the rise of the information age. Positioned in the center of the EP, it functions like a brief hallucination of optimism before the record resumes dragging itself through psychic wreckage. There’s something darkly comic about hearing outdated techno-utopian rhetoric framed by the knowledge of what followed: misinformation economies, algorithmic paranoia, entire populations confidently citing fabricated headlines written by websites that look like phishing scams designed by exhausted raccoons.

The emotional core of the EP, however, sits inside “Bloated & Blue”. Beneath the heaviness and hostility, the song exposes something rawer: isolation curdling into self-erasure. The lyrics move through addiction, self-loathing, suicidal ideation, and emotional abandonment with an uncomfortable directness. Importantly, the track never glamorizes despair. It sounds trapped inside it. The repetition of drowning imagery gives the piece a suffocating quality, as though the music itself were struggling to surface for air.

Closer “Valueless Trade” leaves little room for redemption, which feels consistent with the EP’s worldview. DECENT NEWS aren’t interested in catharsis. They document collapse with the grim focus of people who no longer believe collapse is hypothetical. Yet there’s still an undeniable vitality in the performance. Rage, after all, remains one of the few emotions capable of cutting through contemporary numbness.

Musically, the band’s fusion of industrial textures and hardcore directness avoids many of the clichés that plague both genres. The electronics don’t merely decorate the riffs, and the heaviness never devolves into empty machismo. There’s an underlying sense of social observation holding the whole thing together, however abrasive the delivery becomes.

Released via Kowloon [Walled City] Studios, "Computer EP" feels less like a polished statement than a compressed transmission from inside a nervous breakdown shared collectively by half the planet. Which, to be fair, may currently qualify as realism.

Not exactly comforting listening. But comfort is part of the problem this record is screaming about in the first place.

For years, ambient music has suffered from a peculiar modern indignity: being treated as decorative upholstery for overworked brains. Streaming platforms casually classify entire worlds of sonic exploration as “focus aids”, “deep sleep tools”, or “music to answer emails while your soul quietly evaporates”. Into this algorithmically softened landscape arrives Sustained Tones Vol. 1 by Tiago Sousa, a record that politely but firmly refuses to become background sound. It does not accompany space. It alters it.

Released by Sucata Tapes, this first volume feels like the culmination of ideas Sousa has been patiently refining through his "Organic Music" explorations: sustained harmonic movement, slowly mutating textures, and an approach to composition that seems less interested in linear narrative than in ecological balance. These tracks do not “develop” in the conventional sense. They circulate, breathe, and subtly reorganize themselves, like weather systems becoming conscious of your presence.

There is a rare kind of confidence in this music. Not the confidence of virtuosity demanding attention, but the confidence of an artist who understands exactly how long a sound should remain alive before dissolving. Sousa has always occupied an intriguing position within experimental and minimalist music, balancing modern composition, ambient drift, electroacoustic sensitivity, and a nearly tactile understanding of resonance. His work often feels architectural, but not in the cold geometric sense. More like wandering through abandoned cathedrals overtaken by moss and invisible frequencies.

“Readily Reliance”, the fifteen-minute opener, immediately establishes the album’s peculiar luminosity. Organ-like tones shimmer and overlap in gradual waves, creating motion without urgency. The piece glows rather than progresses. Listening to it feels oddly physical, as though harmonic layers were brushing gently against the nervous system itself. Sousa constructs complexity without announcing it. Patterns emerge, fold into one another, disappear, then return slightly transformed. The effect is hypnotic but never narcotic. There is too much detail lurking beneath the surface for passive listening.

That distinction matters. A great deal of contemporary drone music mistakes slowness for depth. "Sustained Tones Vol. 1" understands that duration alone means nothing unless tension exists within it. Sousa fills his extended forms with minute fluctuations and fragile internal frictions. Even at its most serene, the album carries a subtle instability, as though the tonal structures were balancing on invisible fault lines.
“Flickers” introduces a more unsettled atmosphere. The drones ripple with a faint emotional unease, like light reflecting across water moments before a storm reorganizes the horizon. Sousa excels at this ambiguity. His harmonies often hover between comfort and estrangement without fully resolving into either state. It is music that seems aware of fragility but not defeated by it.

The central piano pieces, “Smooth Flow Into It” and “Swirling Mist and Thin Dust”, provide some of the album’s most affecting moments. Here Sousa allows melody to emerge more openly, though never sentimentally. The piano does not dominate the surrounding textures; it inhabits them carefully, like somebody speaking softly in a vast empty room. There is something profoundly human in these passages, not because they are overtly emotional, but because they acknowledge impermanence so calmly. Sunlight through cracked windows. Dust drifting in slow motion. Civilization collapsing somewhere outside while a single note continues resonating with stubborn dignity.

“Restlessness” darkens the emotional palette considerably. Electronics smear into ghostly layers that feel almost biological, as though the machines themselves had developed insomnia. The track carries a quiet psychological tension, suspended between meditation and anxiety. One begins noticing tiny shifts in tone the way sleepless people notice the sound of electrical appliances at three in the morning. Human consciousness: forever inventing stress from subtle vibrations and unfinished thoughts.

Then comes “Becoming a Landscape”, an ending that feels less like closure than transformation. The title is revealing. Throughout the album, Sousa repeatedly blurs distinctions between interior and exterior spaces, between body and environment, between emotional states and acoustic phenomena. By the end, the listener no longer feels positioned outside the music observing it analytically. One has been absorbed into its slow-moving terrain.

There are echoes here of minimalism, electroacoustic composition, kosmische music, and contemporary drone traditions, but Sousa never sounds derivative. His restraint is too personal for that. One can perhaps sense distant affinities with figures like Eliane Radigue, Harold Budd, or even the patient harmonic sensibilities of William Basinski, yet "Sustained Tones Vol. 1" ultimately inhabits its own carefully sustained emotional climate.

What makes the album linger is its refusal to overstate itself. Sousa does not weaponize grandeur or drown the listener in conceptual rhetoric. Instead, he trusts resonance, duration, and microscopic change. In an age where nearly everything competes aggressively for attention, this feels quietly radical.

Some records attempt to soundtrack reality. "Sustained Tones Vol. 1" behaves more like an alternate condition of it, a place where time loosens its grip slightly and sound becomes less an object than an atmosphere one temporarily lives inside. Not bad for six tracks built largely from sustained tones. Humans have constructed entire economic systems with less structural coherence.